I just watched an entire episode of Game of Thrones and not one single character got sexually assaulted.

Ed Note: I haven’t gotten any comments or, really, any hits since posting this but I thought I should clarify that I don’t find this funny (as I typically write humor, I can see how someone would assume that) but rather surprising in a good way. The producers have been leaning on sexual assault for too many characterizations of late, and while I do think it’s an effective if disturbing way of showing that women in the society portrayed are basically property I’m glad they chose not to depict sexual assault in this episode because it’s getting to be gratuitous rather than illustrative.

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The internets have been crazy the past few days, which has meant my blogging time has turned into my frantically-pressing-the-F4-key-and-laughing time, but I did want to share a link that I found through Yes and Yes. I like listening to people talk about the creative process,* and I like John Cleese, so this was great:

I’ve mentioned it in the past, but just in case anyone new is around I’ll state it again: I work at a toy store.*

I’ll pause so you can stop sniggering.

Okay, done? Good. Anyway, as anyone who works retail is aware, there are busy days and dead days in any store. It doesn’t matter how well-staffed you are, or how well the schedules are created (ours are fine), but you’re going to have some periods of mind-numbing boredom. Unfortunately, I happen to work a lot of the dead days. While, for me, there are upsides to working in retail – flexible working days,** four-day weeks, and not having as much stress come home with me every damned day, unlike the office jobs I’ve had – one of the major downsides of it is the dead days. Few customers means little to do and no distractions (like the internet, hello office jobs***), and, well, I can only organize the stuffed animals by size and animal type so many times before I want to put a bullet between my eyes. So I’ve had to find entertainment for myself for those slow-as-hell-days. Enter the game I play with myself in moments of extreme boredom, which I like to call “What If It Were Alive?”

As you may have inferred from the name, the premise is to imagine what various toys would be like if they were, in fact, alive. Lame, I understand. Maybe I watched Toy Story one too many times as a wee thing, but whatever, it passes the time. Most of the toys we have in the store are pretty cute (don’t let the creepy doll on the homepage fool you, every single North American Bear Company toy would just be like a small, fuzzy, cuddly pet if it were animate, especially the cozies) so the game can be pleasant. However, there are some toys I imagine as incredibly horrible if able to walk and talk. Exhibit A is the Groovy Girls line of dolls. Seriously, those things make me think of the early-teen bitch queens from middle school. All smiles, but they’re totally talking about you behind your back. The idea of either PlanCity people or PlayMobil people coming to life is also strangely disconcerting, because I imagine them to be a mute, unstoppable force of tiny-infrastructure-building. Kind of like army ants, only instead of eating you alive their primary objective would be to build tiny little roads that lead nowhere all over your house, and then drive little wooden cars down them at breakneck speed.**** However distasteful any of those ideas may be, they are absolutely nothing compared to the horror and revulsion I’ve experienced imagining living, moving Calico Critters toys.

If you’re not five year old or familiar with the Sylvianian Family/Calico Critters toys and cartoons from the ’80s, you may have missed these things. Be glad you did, because even without imagining them able to move on their own these things are fucking creepy. They’re a bunch of three-inch high faux-cutesy animals with the most dead, glossless black eyes I have ever seen on a toy. Take, for example, the Furbanks Squirrel Family (no, I am not making that name up):*****

Son of a bitch, they're watching us.

Creepy, am I right? As if the fucking scary little eyes and the sensation that they’re just waiting for you to turn your back on them isn’t bad enough, the entire line has uncomfortably Republican undertones: all the Families are nuclear, every “playset” is geared towards stay-at-home-mom activities like playdates and grocery shopping (seriously), and everything looks like it came out of an era comprised of various aesthetics from white, middle-class America in the ’40s and ’50s. I mean, look at the mom squirrel. You didn’t have to wonder which one I was talking about, did you? No, because even though all of the look exactly the same, you can easily identify the mom by the frilly dress and fucking apron. Christ. The only non-Norman-Rockwell part of all of this is that they sell sets of twins and triplets on their own, but some of the creatures the multiples are based on don’t have a corresponding nuclear family playset you can purchase. Apparently they sprang from nowhere which makes me suspect there’s an argument for creationism buried in the dead eyes and frilly dresses, but I’ve admittedly spent too much time in the Bible Belt than is healthy and, in any case, I’m really getting off the rails here. The point is, most of these are horrible when inanimate. They’re terrifying when you imagine them living, like little zombie Stepford Animals. I didn’t think they could get worse, but then our store got a new line of Calico Critters: the Meerkat Spotter Triplets.

I know, I know. Meerkats automatically ratchet up the cuteness and tolerability of anything tenfold. In fact, if you were sitting in front of me right now, you’d probably say, “but MJ, meerkats are super cute!” And you know what, you’re right, they are. Fucking adorable, in fact, what with the little paws and the popping up out of holes in the ground. So now you’d be saying, “well, super cute animals are hard to fuck up,” and you are, generally speaking, correct. I’m with you so far. But then, then you would get all confident and say: “but you can’t even succeed in making a meerkat un-cute even in terrifying three-inch-tall format, correct?” And there’s where you are so, so staggeringly wrong. Hold on to your butts, people, because I have proof that the meerkat’s cuteness can be harnessed for pure unadulterated evil:

Kill it, kill it now.

As you may have noticed, I’m a wordy person. I could write paragraphs about how terrifying these things are. Really, I could. But instead, I will present you with this scenario: imagine waking up one night at three a.m., walking into your kitchen for a glass of water, and turning on the light only to see a pack of these monsters slowly look up from the breadcrumbs they’re eating off your kitchen counter to just stare at you.

* Yes, my boss does know “what I’m like,” thanks.
** This is unusual in retail, but my boss does not care if we swap shifts around so it’s super flexible. Thank god, because it’s awesome.
*** How many of you read this from work? Be honest.
**** Both are German companies, so in my mind they must drive excessively fast. I know, I know, stereotyping.
***** An interesting sidenote on the Calico Critters is that they seem to be prejudiced against dogs. All the other families have wholesome, punny, or just plain cutesy little names, like the Furbanks Squirrels or the Elwood Elephants, but the dogs are all descriptive. The Beagle Dog Family. The Dalmatian Dog Family. Come on, Calico Critters, where’s the love for man’s best friend?

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R: Why is there the pervasive stereotype that girls love ponies and horses?
M: Hell if I know. Why are girls supposed to like pink and purple?
R: Yeah, but I’ve met people who liked colors, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who loved horses as much as girls are supposed to. And aside from the crazy sexism, the girls like pink and purple thing actually cropping up in real life can be partially explained by the fact that so much stuff “for” girls is pink and purple based on the trope, so it just becomes the color of their stuff, you know? Then they’ll tell you they like those colors, because so much stuff that they have is in those colors. But I don’t think I’ve ever met any girl who was crazy about ponies.
M: You have a point.
R: I mean, if you grabbed an eight year old girl off the street, fuck, I don’t mean if you literally grabbed the girl off the street, I mean, if you took an eight year old girl… I, Christ, that’s also a terrible way to start a sentence, okay, if there were a hypothetical situation in which you could ask an eight year old girl whether or not she liked ponies, she probably wouldn’t care about them. There.
M: Wow. And… Yes?

When I lived in Florida, I worked at a museum for a while. It was an awesome job and I loved the vast majority of my time spent there,* but it did suffer from the standard problem faced by museums, zoos, and other large public cultural institutions: the building design was about as well-thought-out as a steam-powered sofa, and as it grew anything and everything was co-opted for office space, including broom closets, dark rooms and bathrooms.** A side effect of this poor planning meant that I, instead of being able to flee out a side door like any sensible public servant, had to walk through a bunch of heavily trafficked areas, by the front desk, and past the gift shop to leave the building.

One fateful day, as I was leaving my office and walking to the parking lot, I looked up and saw A Celebrity hanging out in the crowd by the gift shop, minding his own business. You know who this person is, since he’s had several major movies in his career and is a member of a money-grubbing cult so-called religion that’s particularly popular among actors. For the sake of anonymity, let’s just call him Ton Jravolta. As I’m not particularly into celebrities or cult members, after I had my moment of cognitive dissonance*** and dismissed my half-formed fear that a gun-toting Wruce Billis would show up looking for a watch, a toaster would go off and shit would go down in my place of business,**** I walked on by.

As I was walking by, I noticed a gentleman – and by “gentleman” I mean “asshole” – on his cell phone, not three feet from Mr. Jravolta himself, screaming into his phone about OH MY GOD HE IS RIGHT BEHIND ME. TON JRAVOLTA. BEHIND. ME. I KNOW. I KNOW. I CANNOT BELIEVE I AM STANDING THIS CLOSE TO TON JRAVOLTA. DO YOU THINK HE WILL DO THAT THING FROM THE MOVIE I LOVE. TON JRAVOLTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Dude was successfully drawing more stares than the guy he was screaming about.***** And here’s where things get weird for me, personally: I was totally, disproportionally appalled by cell phone guy’s behavior. Like, completely ragey that the douche was acting so douchey in a place I worked and pissed that he might potentially add to the already abysmal reputation of Central Floridians everywhere. I was actually surprised by my own ridiculous anger at the situation and immediately booked it out to my car.

The weird part about this is that I like to think I don’t really give a shit about celebrities’ feelings and sense of privacy in public, really. If you earn millions of dollars a year for almost anything and you are not as brilliant and talented as Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein rolled into one terrifying mass of ability and genius, you can deal with the fact that going out in public is going to be A Situation – and that goes double if you’ve earned that money in part by being recognizable to a hell of a lot of people. And yet, I was pissed off by cell phone asshole’s ridiculous conversation. It’s been a few years since this indecent, and I’ve had time to reflect on why, exactly, I was so repulsed by this behavior. I’ve determined that, given my reaction, one of the following things must be true about me:

1) I care way, way more about the possibility of one of the most recognizable actors in the U.S. feeling awkward and uncomfortable than I had previously realized, or
2) I, like any good Southerner, know that the only polite way to talk about someone is quietly, and behind their back.******

While neither of these options say much about me, I hope like hell it’s number two.

* And it was one of the only workplaces where I could use phrases like “just past the mummified bodies, to the left of the mastodon skeleton” when giving people directions to the bathroom and not prompt a visit from the police inquiring about my after-hours hobbies, but that particular job perk is neither here nor there.
** I worked in a former dark room. It was a dream, let me tell you.
*** NOOO. YOU LIVE IN THE TEE VEES.
**** Quick test of age: did you first think of 1) heroin and Los Angeles or 2) white suits and the Bee Gees?
***** Remember we’re in rural Central Florida for this story, which means celebrities are apparitions from god as far as most people are concerned. Outshining a celebrity there takes insane amounts of noise, obnoxiousness, or a flat-out shocking physical deformity.
****** Throw in a quick “bless her heart” if you really want to bitch someone out with an iron-clad lack of guilt.

1. Yes, I’ve finally finished Breaking Bad [Edited: what in the hell, WordPress? Italicize properly!] but I’ve also been actually working full-time because I’ve picked up a hell of a lot of shifts at work. Unfortunately this means I’m all over the place because I’ve not had two days in a row off in too long. I frequently think I’m going to get a day off only to be asked to cover a shift. Yes, I know many people have it far worse, and yes, I like working, earning money, and paying bills in full and on time, but the unpredictable nature of my downtime is starting to stress me the fuck out.

2. I’ve been in a complete reading slump lately. I usually clock ten or fifteen books in a month, but I read a grand total of two in March. I’ve finished one this month. Too many books are being returned to the library unfinished. I have been busy with other things (see point number 1), but nevertheless this is annoying because I get antsy when I don’t have a good book around. Does anyone have suggestions? Fiction, please – the last few books I finished were non-fiction and I need to change it up.

3. Speaking of books, can everyone please stop babbling on about The Hunger Games? They’re good books, yes – and infinitely better than fucking Twilight – but that doesn’t change the fact that a) Katniss is really fucked up (in an understandable way, given her situation) and therefore not necessarily an OMG! Great Role Model! for anyone, b) Gale is a complete asshole, c) Peeta is so stereotypically the perfect teenage male nice-guy that he makes my teeth hurt* and d) this is not the second coming of The Chronicles of Narnia in terms of cleverness or lasting power so please chill the fuck out. Also, let’s all shut up about the movie. Thanks in advance.

4. One of the downsides of being allergic to a random assortment of common things is that you actually wind up looking at and purchasing “all-natural”** alternatives to various items. Since the vast majority of my allergies crop up as random skin problems, this means I have spent waaaaay too much time and money on crap like hippie shampoos and soaps. Most of these things are complete failures and I could write entire posts on how ridiculous the entire natural beauty products industry is, but I’m happy to report that you can successfully wash your hair with baking soda and not look like a hobo.

* And he is a baker’s kid named after fucking bread. That’s worse than Katniss being named after an herb (flower?) because her dad was a hunter.
** By all-natural I mean “contains ingredients that I would recognize in a store,” not “avoiding things synthesized by beings from beyond the void, therefore not containing anything occurring in nature.”*** Mainly because I have no clue what chemicals I’m actually allergic to, so avoiding them all is way, way easier.
*** Does anyone else get frustrated at the all-natural label? First of all, the entire fucking universe is natural. Second, there are some really unpleasant things in nature. I certainly don’t want to chow down on a big bowl of arsenic any more than I want poison ivy secretions in my soap, but they’re both all-natural.

Have you ever prepared a cover letter for a job application, worked on it obsessively for hours, then submitted, only to suddenly panic and convince yourself that you misspelled something simple like the name of the position, the organization, or, for fuck’s sake, your own name* when you know you didn’t?

Yeah, just did that.

*I did actually misspell my own name on a cover letter once. I was still hired at an ungodly high salary rate in spite of this idiocy, which probably says more about the organization I worked at than it does about me.**
** For bonus fuck-up points, I also mistyped my own phonenumber when forwarding it to my future boss when they wanted to discuss the job offer. This didn’t dissuade them, either. That motherfucking job, I have not the words.